Slope stability is one of the most complex and essential issues for civil and geotechnical engineers, mainly due to life and high economical losses resulting from these failures. In this paper, a new approach is presented for estimating the Safety Factor (SF) for circular failure slope using hybrid support vector regression (SVR) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The ACO is combined with the S...

Mine fill is the material placed underground to fill the voids created by mining excavations. It provides overall large scale ground stabilization while allowing localized pillar recovery. In addition to providing a working floor or back, mine fill has the potential to reduce subsidence and minimize dilution. Mine fill is essential to cut and fill, benching and sublevel stoping mining methods. ...

The understanding of soil behavior during the last 300 years has centered on mechanical principles, geological processes, and later on, mineralogy and the relevance of colloidal chemistry. More recently, research in biology and earth science has enabled important advances in understanding the crucial involvement of microorganisms in the evolution of the earth, their ubiquitous presence in near ...

The municipalities of Ubatuba, Campos do Jordão, and São José dos Campos are located in the region of São Paulo State (Brazil). These municipalities are recognized nationally for having an elevated number of recorded landslides on slopes and embankments. In addition, these municipalities contain multiple areas that are at risk for landslides. Various soil landslides occurred in these municipali...

The potential for basin amplification of ground motion from significant seismic sources 100-200 km (62-124 mi.) from the Las Vegas Valley (such as the Death Valley Fault System) and Quaternary faults in the valley could provide sufficient energy to cause liquefaction. Key criteria of liquefiable soils coupled with a shallow groundwater table (less than 15 m (50 ft)) are met at several sites in ...

The geotechnical engineering properties of soil exhibit varied and uncertain behaviour due to the complex and imprecise physical processes associated with the formation of these materials (Jaksa, 1995). This is in contrast to most other civil engineering materials, such as steel, concrete and timber, which exhibit far greater homogeneity and isotropy. In order to cope with the complexity of geo...

This paper presents ongoing research in improvement of analytical tools for the characterization of rock mass structure from oriented borehole discontinuity data. Using automated multivariate cluster analysis and the “three dimensional stereonet” provides for fast and objective characterization of oriented core discontinuity data. Improvements to the CYL software include three new methods of cl...

Seismic site effects are influenced mainly by geospatial uncertainties corresponding to geological or geotechnical spatial variance. Therefore, the development of a geospatial database is essential to characterize site-specific geotechnical information in multiscale areas and to optimize geospatial zonation methods with potentially high degrees of spatial variability based on trial-and-error ge...

Shallow earth translational slides and earth flows, affecting colluvial soils derived by the weathering of the clayey bedrock, are a recurrent problem causing damage to buildings and roads in many areas of Apennines. The susceptibility assessment, e.g. slope stability models, requires the preliminary characterization of these superficial covers (lithology, geotechnical and hydraulic parameters)...